Japan Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant blog
Tracking Fukushima news from day 1 : | Now one of the world's largest Public Available Repositories of the Chronology of the Daiichi Nuclear ongoing Disaster.
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Saturday, 22 September 2012

A district in Futaba town, about 5.6 kilometers northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, was exposed to the highest radiation level outside the plant after it was crippled by the quake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, according to data released by the prefecture Friday.

An hourly dose of 1,590 microsieverts was logged in the Kamihatori area of Futaba at 3 p.m. the day after the disaster struck, the data retrieved from radiation monitoring posts showed. The recorded amount exceeds even the annual radiation exposure limit of 1,000 microsieverts set by the government for the general public.

Friday, 21 September 2012

"Arnie Gundersen joins Helen Caldicott on If You Love This Planet to discuss the ongoing release of radiation at Fukushima Daichi and what methods are being used to contain the damage. The water being used to cool the reactor is highly radioactive and is still being released into the Pacific. They deal with the dilemma of workers endangerment and ongoing radiation leakage. Information about health effects on children in the first 18 months since the accident is discussed."

<snips>
Helen Caldicott: I needed to get you back because you have been saying some new things about Fukushima. And I have got quite a lot of questions too. So I think as usual, you need to give us a complete update of Units I, II, III and IV, where they stand, what your thinking is now, and the like, please, Arnie. So the floor is yours.

AG: O.K. Thank you. Well, let's go IV, III, II, I, for a change. On Unit IV, the walls have been knocked down and that is a good thing. The plan is . . .

HC: What do you mean the walls have been knocked down? I do not know what you mean by that.

AG: The explosion kind of devastated everything _(within?)__ the last 2 floors of the reactor. So they ripped out the remaining structures and they are down at what we would call the operating floor.

HC: Well you mean the building still stands but they have taken out the 2 upper floors, is that right?

AG: Yes. If the building was 100 feet tall, now it is 60 feet tall. They have taken out all of the superstructure above the nuclear reactor and that was a very high bay area where the massive cranes moved and where the refueling bridges moved. So all of that has been removed and there is going to be shortly, essentially a flat area where Tokyo Electric plans to work......

AG: Well each bundle will have to get lifted and put into a shielded container underwater.

HC: Yes.

AG: As soon as those things come out of the water they are so highly radioactive, they would kill the people on the operating floor. So all of this has to be done with the fuel pool full of water. So they will lift out one bundle at a time and of course the question is, are the bundles distorted because of the heat or have they been damaged because of all the rubble that fell into the pool. But in theory anyway, they will be able to go down and grab the bundle, pull it out still underwater, carry it to the side of the pool, and underwater still there will be a huge canister. They will lift the fuel into that huge canister, put a lid on it. That huge canister weighs something like a hundred tons. ....

HC: Well now, how long is it going to take to reinforce the building? You say they have got to build a new wall on the far side from the ocean, on the land side.

AG: Yes.

HC: To make it strong enough to be able to put this incredibly heavy crane on top of the building. How long will it take, a) to build the building, per se, before they

AG: They claim it will take a year.

HC: A year. So you have got a year to build the building. Then they have got to put the crane on top of the building. That probably will not take so long, right?

AG: Right. Something on the order of 18 months from now, they will be able to move fuel.

HC: 18 months before they move the fuel and then it is going to take another year to totally remove the fuel from the pool. So we are talking about 2 1/2 years.

AG: We are talking 2015 or 2016 before that gets done....

AG: Now the beauty of Unit IV is that there is nothing in the nuclear reactor. As they go up, to I, II, and III, of course, you have got to empty the fuel pool and that is not clear, especially Unit III, how much damage is in the fuel pool. I think the damage in Unit III's pool is extensive. But then you have got to get in the nuclear reactors on I, II, and III. Of course, the fuel is melted down there, so it is not as simple as grabbing the bundles and lifting them out. The fuel is actually melted and is a blob on the bottom of the reactor if you are lucky and in fact, more likely has leaked through the reactor and is a blob on the concrete. So they are going to be much more difficult than Unit IV.

....
HC: Oh, so they are still pouring water over the molten fuel?

AG: Yes.

HC: Seawater?

AG: It is probably not molten, Helen. It is probably a solid lump that is very hot. But yes, they are still pouring water over it, to the tune of tens of tons a day for each reactor. And that water is coming back out incredibly radioactive and rather than pump it right back in, they are cleaning it with the mineralizer system that is very sophisticated, and very expensive. But in the process now, they are creating hundreds of demineralizer residues. Think of like a Brita filter, hundreds of those, but of course those are the size of a car, that are highly radioactive with cesium that has got a 300 year lifetime, that they are putting out on a field behind the plant. And still the concentration of radioactivity in the water is not going down because it is in direct contact with nuclear fuel....

HC: So that indicates if in the turbine buildings which is 3 buildings distant from the reactor itself, therefore you would extrapolate back and say that if the radiation is as high as that in the turbine buildings, it will be higher in each of the other buildings to the reactor itself, right? So you extrapolate.

AG: That is exactly right. And if they dismantle this building, they still have the same radioactive material. Now they have got to move it some place where it is clean. That does not make a lot of sense. So it very well may be that the Japanese will say, OK, we made a huge mistake. But we are going to use the Fukushima site as the ultimate waste repository for everything we are finding on the site, rather than contaminate another location.....

HC: OK. Now how much radiation would you estimate is still escaping every day from Units I, II, and III which are leaking like sieves to quote you.

AG: It would not surprise me if it was a billion becquerels a day from both water and gaseous . . . A billion disintegrations per second of radiation in a day. And of course once that billion leaks out, it is going to continue to decay, but just not in the reactor. As it moves around the world, it will continue to decay. Now a billion is a big number but the initial accident had about 12 more zeros behind it. So compared to the first day or week of the initial accident, it is small. But compared to an operating nuclear plant where everything is just fine, it is huge....

<end snips>doom... thankyou... nicely under the carpet.....

and then there is the children and the suposition that fuku is compared to the atomic weapons of WWII:<snip>
AG: Yes. Then of course after that comes the iodine. Now that only has an 8 day half life, but it is selectively absorbed by thyroid. There is a good study out I think last week, that shows in Hiroshima victims, the kids continued to have thyroid problems up into their 50's, 60's and 70's. So it used to be thought that if you got through the first couple of years, you are out of the woods, but for the children, whose thyroid's are growing, apparently that is not true and that they are seeing continual thyroid problems essentially for life for the kids who were attached, who passed that . . . the iodine.

HC: Yes, the children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were affected mostly by external gamma radiation, there was not a lot of internal radiation from radioactive iodine. Even now, so many years later, how many years is it? It is 45, it is . . . 60 years later are still developing thyroid cancers. And one third of thyroid cancers metastasize and kill the patients. But we are now seeing within the first 18 months after Fukushima, they have examined 18,000 children under the age of 15 or 18 in Fukushima Prefecture, sorry 38,000 or so and 36% of them are showing thyroid cysts and/or nodules by ultrasound examination. They are not being biopsied to see if the cells are malignant. That is really gross medical irresponsibility. And they are downplaying it and they are not really informing the parents what it means.

AG: The number I heard in comparison is that a normal population of children of that age have 1%. So clearly this is . . .

HC: This is 36%. That is off the chart. But it is early, see, and you do not expect to see in Chernobyl, they did not see thyroid tumors until 3 to 4 years post accident. This is in the first 18 months. So therefore you would assume that these children got a whopping dose of radioactive iodine into their thyroid glands by inhalation and ingestion of contaminated food. And that is the tip of the iceberg. That indicates that lots of other cancers are going to start developing too, from internal emitters that get into their livers, their heart, their brain, their muscles, their bones and the like.

AG: Yes. So we talked about noble gasses, we talked about iodine and all of the other ones which everybody seems to lump into cesium. But it is cesium 134, cesium 137, it is strontium and rubidium and on and on and on.

HC: Well you are a nuclear engineer. Give us some of the others, just name them Arnie. So people have an idea.

AG: I am most concerned about uranium. We are finding uranium in samples which indicates fuel melt and stuff like that and as a heavy element, we are surprised to be able to pick it up a couple of hundred miles away. One of the samples I took in Tokyo had uranium in it. So that is just an indication of a gross core breech and things like that. So we are finding some data out of Europe that talks about dust in homes and the homes are 100 miles away. And we are looking at per kilogram so for 2.2 pounds, 100,000 disintegrations per second in a kilogram of dust. Now that is a lot of dust. But the Japanese sleep on the floor.
<end snip>

HC: Well I mean, the only time they have ever tried to remove melted fuel was at Three Mile Island. And that took them 10 years, did it not?

AG: Yes. And that was easy.

HC: But that really was not melted like the way these 3 have really . . .

AG: Right. TMI had a blob of nuclear fuel on the bottom. But it had not breeched the vessel. All of these vessels have been breeched, the control rods come in at the bottom and they are leaking like a sieve. So it is likely that fuel has oozed out through the control rods, if not burned it's way right out.

It is likely Unit II has burned it's way right out and is now lying on the concrete. And I think that is really the big change . . . , in my view of the problem, is what they are finding in Units I, II, and III now. Let's think of a nuclear reactor as a pressure cooker.

....

AG: So they have contaminated the reactor, the bottom of the containment, the torus, which is that donut-shaped thing, the reactor building which is outside that, the thing that blew up, the floor of that is contaminated, and the building next to it, the turbine hall, should be the least radioactive and it is still a million disintegrations per second per every liter. So my thought is now, considering the extent of this contamination, that it is not fair to the workers to have them going in and clean this. And I think if I were Tokyo Electric's management, a couple of more years out after the cooling is completely done, I would consider filling up those containment buildings with concrete and walking away for 300 years. You know, obviously monitoring it, but I do not think it is fair to the workers to expose them to the extraordinary levels they will receive if they were to try to turn that site back into a green field.

HC: They could not turn it back into a green field. That is ridiculous. But anyway . . .

AG: Yes, you are right. And of course the big concern would be you have got to make sure you have got it all captured and it is not going down into the water table.

HC: But it will, and if you put concrete on it, you know it is going to keep going down into the water table and you know it is going to keep contaminating the Pacific Ocean for the rest of time.

AG: Right. So there is no good solution.

HC: No there is none.

AG: Absolutely no good solution. But the solution would be to bore holes underneath and constantly pull water out from under the building so that whatever leaks down gets treated. So we are still back with these big de-mineralizers again. But to my mind, I could not, as a manager, order a couple of thousand workers to pick up extraordinarily high exposures to dismantle these plants at this point in time.

Quoting: Waterbug

we have 20+ sunscreen in aus because it is the sun... *cough... we are one of the most irradiated places on the planet........... sun cancer......... shhhhhhhhhh........ don' tell anyone...........

The head of a major investigation into Japan’s nuclear disaster is defending his report against criticism that his panel avoided blaming individuals and instead blamed elements of the nation’s culture.

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a doctor who headed the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, said he sticks with his view that the catastrophe was “Made in Japan,” underlining collusion among the regulators and the utility that had set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He said his panel intentionally stopped short of naming individual culprits.

“No one takes responsibility in Japan, even those in positions of responsibility,” Kurokawa told The Associated Press this week at his commission office in Tokyo. “This is unique to Japan, a culture that stresses conformity, where people don’t complain.”

In an age of Internet and information...this is a fax worthy report. Scew it into a ball put it in the bin. It's a system run by people who rely on abnormal business practice, example people living in school gyms, second biggest economy can't /will not help it's own. An obvious attempt to produce rems of paper that lead....nowhere. Problem solved."

Further-

"The 641-page report, released in July, compiled interviews with 1,167 people and scoured documents obtained from nuclear regulators and Tokyo Electric Power Co, the utility that operated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

A devastating March 2011 tsunami set off by a 9.0 magnitude quake destroyed backup generators and sent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into multiple meltdowns and explosions. About 150,000 people were evacuated from a 20-kilometer no-go zone. Fears remain in Fukushima about cancer and other sickness from radiation."

Oh yes, and bamboo spears could down a B-29 bomber, because it's all in your mind, it's all how you think.From NHK News (part, link won't last since it's NHK; 9/14/2012): 原発事故による食品への風評被害と、悪質商法による高齢者被害の２つを消費者問題の重点項目として、政府は風評被害を防ぐための集会を開いたり、高齢者に注意を呼びかける電話をかけたりして対策を強化していくことになりました。 The national government has come up with the two important consumer issues to focus on: damage on food industries due to baseless rumors because of the nuclear accident, and businesses that aim to defraud senior citizens. Countermeasures will include hosting meetings to prevent baseless rumors and making ph...more »

The head of a major investigation into Japan’s nuclear disaster is defending his report against criticism that his panel avoided blaming individuals and instead blamed elements of the nation’s culture.

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a doctor who headed the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, said he sticks with his view that the catastrophe was “Made in Japan,” underlining collusion among the regulators and the utility that had set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He said his panel intentionally stopped short of naming individual culprits.....
....“No one takes responsibility in Japan, even those in positions of responsibility,” Kurokawa told The Associated Press this week at his commission office in Tokyo. “This is unique to Japan, a culture that stresses conformity, where people don’t complain.”

People are complaining, however, about the commission’s report, not only for lacking specifics on responsibility but for making statements on Japan’s culture that appeared in the English-language version of the document but not the Japanese version....

In an age of Internet and information...this is a fax worthy report. Scew it into a ball put it in the bin. It's a system run by people who rely on abnormal business practice, example people living in school gyms, second biggest economy can't /will not help it's own. An obvious attempt to produce rems of paper that lead....nowhere. Problem solved.

<end snip>

<snip>

One searches in vain through these pages for anyone to blame,” Columbia University professor and Japan expert Gerald Curtis wrote in an opinion piece submitted to The Financial Times. “To pin the blame on culture is the ultimate cop-out. If culture explains behavior, then no one has to take responsibility.”

“No one takes responsibility in Japan, even those in positions of responsibility,” Kurokawa told The Associated Press this week at his commission office in Tokyo. “This is unique to Japan, a culture that stresses conformity, where people don’t complain.”

People are complaining, however, about the commission’s report, not only for lacking specifics on responsibility but for making statements on Japan’s culture that appeared in the English-language version of the document but not the Japanese version.

The 641-page report, released in July, compiled interviews with 1,167 people and scoured documents obtained from nuclear regulators and Tokyo Electric Power Co, the utility that operated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
<end snip>

Thursday, 13 September 2012

By the way, TEPCO released 600 photographs taken by its employees and workers from affiliate companies at the plant in the early days of the nuclear accident (starting March 11, 2011). They are only available at TEPCO's Photos and Videos site in Japanese. Look for entries that have September 11, 2012 date (2012年9月11日).Here's the summary document (PDF) which lists the photos with brief descriptions, as well as thumbnails of photos of particular locations (from page 15).Page 16: Landing dock right before the tsunami, water withdrawing and exposing the dock structure. (Click to enl...more »

TEPCO claims these bits and pieces are clogging up the valves and pipes that carry the treated water back into the reactors. Shavings and metal bits.From the 9/11/2012 Photo:The company also has a very short video that supposedly shows the cleaning operation of the water inside the buffer tank, by catching these shavings and bits. But as you see toward the end of the brief video, you still see tons of white things still flowing around. The photo was taken on September 10, the video on September 8. more »

The researchers say it has nothing to do with the nuclear accident, and the child must have developed the thyroid cancer before the accident. From Kyodo News (9/11/2012):１８歳以下１人が甲状腺がん 福島健康調査８万人分析One case of thyroid cancer, under 18, according to the health survey of 80,000 東京電力福島第１原発事故による放射線の影響を調べている福島県の「県民健康管理調査」の検討委員会（座長・山下俊一福島県立医大副学長）が１１日開かれ、事故発生当時１８歳以下を対象とした甲状腺検査について、１人が甲状腺がんと報告された。 The committee for "Fukushima Health Management Survey" to study the effect of radiation from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident (headed by Shunichi Yamashita, Vice President of Fukushi...more »

Exactly one and a half year since the start of the nuclear accident on March 11, 2011, this is where Japan stands. All the lip service to "protecting children" or "children are our future" is, well, lip service.The mayor of a big city in Kanagawa Prefecture declares eating food containing radioactive cesium in the school lunches is part of children's education. A large city in Fukushima Prefecture in the highly contaminated Nakadori (middle third) refuses to install air conditioning systems in the city's public schools because children should not miss the opportunity to learn abou...more »

Incurious TEPCO's conclusion for now is that the white pieces floating in the buffer tank and caught by the strainer are the shavings of plastic pipes and they are the cause of the decreased water flow into the reactors.From Yomiuri Shinbun (9/6/2012):福島第一の注水量低下、配管の削りかすが原因かDecrease in the amount of water injected [into the reactor] caused by shavings from the pipes? 福島第一原子力発電所１～３号機の原子炉を冷やす注水量が必要量を下回った問題で、東京電力は６日、ポリエチレン製配管の削りかすが弁や配管などに詰まった可能性が高いと発表した。 TEPCO announced on September 6 that it was likely that the shavings from the polyethylene pipes were clogging up the valves and p...more »

Not much, unfortunately, due to the nature of the paper whose focus is on the protocol, not data analysis.The Japan Epidemiological Association's official magazine "Journal of Epidemiology" has the paper titled "Study Protocol for the Fukushima Health Management Survey", by Seiji Yasumura et al (including Dr. Shunichi Yamashita).It is about the health survey on Fukushima residents including children, from which some fantastic stories have been woven and disseminated, including "CONFIRMED: 36 Percent Of Fukushima Kids Have Abnormal Thyroid Growths".Thyroid examination of childr...more »

TEPCO still hasn't identified the cause for the decreased water flow into the reactors (1, 2, and 3), but the company suspects some rust or foreign particles clogging the system somewhere. On September 5, a video camera was submerged into one of the buffer tanks that store the treated water before the water is fed back into the reactors.White particles floating around, like near the bottom of the ocean. I wonder what they are. TEPCO explains the bubbling seen in the video as "nitrogen".Here's a photo of the strainer of one of the 5 "chiller" machines (to cool water), from TEPCO...more »

as if he has any say in it. Or maybe he thinks he will shortly. He must be counting on the Liberal Democratic Party becoming the ruling party again, with one of his sons at the helm. (That son was the one who diagnosed people against nuclear power as suffering from hysteria, in July last year.)As Jiji Tsushin reports, he spoke like the de facto leader of LDP anyway. From Jiji Tsushin (9/6/2012):福井でもんじゅ視察＝「廃炉はとんでもない」－石原都知事Tokyo Governor Ishihara visits Monju in Fukui: "Decommissioning? Not a chance." 東京都の石原慎太郎知事は６日、日本原子力研究開発機構の高速増殖炉「もんじゅ」（福井県敦賀市）を視察した。石原知事は視察後、「もんじゅは世界に先駆けた画期的な技...more »

The whole-body radiation dose estimate for adults (older than 17) in Sendai, Miyagi during the 60 days from March 11 to May 11, 2011 may be as high as *1.2 millisievert*, assuming being outside at all times with constant high physical activity levels.From the US Department of Defense press release (9/5/2012; emphasis is mine):Registry to Provide Japan Response Radiation InfoBy Jim GaramoneAmerican Forces Press ServiceWASHINGTON, Sept. 5, 2012 – Though no Defense Department personnel or their families were exposed to radiation causing adverse health conditions following the n...more »

(UPDATE 9/7/2012) It looks like Hosono flip-flopped. Now he says he is not running. What a surprise. His reason, according to Yomiuri, is just incredible: 2 weeks of campaigning for the DPJ leadership election will distract him from important tasks for the recovery of Fukushima. That recovery hasn't really happened after one year and 6 months, and he wants us to believe this particular 2-week period in September is too critical. (As I said, incredible.)(H/T anon reader) ===============================Oh what a surprise. (Not.)These DPJ politicians are indeed from outer space, ...more »

(UPDATE) According to Washington Post, workers were preparing a chemical solution to treat waste water when the accident happened. (H/T reader Atomfritz)=====================================The cause of the accident is, according to the AFP article below, "oxygenated steam [which] had escaped after hydrogen peroxide reacted with water in a reservoir" during a maintenance operation.(Now why are they pouring hydrogen peroxide in the reservoir? Killing the algae, perhaps?)From AFP (9/5/2012):Two slightly injured in accident at French nuclear plantFESSENHEIM, France — A steam ...more »

To help Fukushima recover, of course. Wirtschaft über alles. Above well-being of children.(That's part of what 20-plus years of economic "malaise" does to a country.)From NHK Tokyo Metropolitan Edition (link won't last, emphasis is mine; 9/4/2012):福島県への修学旅行など誘致[Fukushima officials] luring school trips to Fukushima Prefecture 震災や原発事故の影響によって、修学旅行などの目的で福島県を訪れる生徒が大幅に減っているため、福島県の担当者が４日、都立高校の校長などが集まる会議に参加して誘致活動を行いました。 On September 4, officials from the Fukushima prefectural government dropped by at the conference of the principals of metropolitan (public) high schools (in Tokyo) to...more »

The country is either in denial, or in delusion, or in both. Or in the same mental state when many truly believed that bamboo spears wielded by young girls could down the B29 bombers. It may have taken 26 years for the Ukrainian government to contemplate redeveloping part of the evacuation zone around Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but the Japanese will do better than that and do it in three years since the start of the accident. The Reconstruction Agency, modeled after the one that was set up right after the devastation of Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, says it now has a "Grand ...more »

If you think the Democratic Party of Japan's senior members wanting Goshi Hosono to become the next party leader (and thus prime minister of Japan) are from outer space, they now have a company. Senior members of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which wants to wrestle the power from the DPJ in the upcoming Lower House election, want to have as the new party leader one of the sons of Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara. They think the son will win them the election. Why? Because they think so.Ishihara junior is the one who suggested last year that ordinary citizens should not ...more »

While TEPCO still doesn't know exactly what is causing the decrease in the amount of water being injected into the reactors to (supposedly) cool the reactors (see my previous post), the company has come up with the possible culprits: rust and plankton.Yes, plankton. Why? Because the water being injected into the Reactor Pressure Vessels of Reactors 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant is not just the treated water after decontamination and desalination. The treated water is mixed with the filtered river water. Clearly, plankton escapes the filter.From Jiji Tsushin (9/3/...more »